Today we are showcasing the photo series Back to la Défense taken by the artist Adriana Ferrarese.

Adriana is an Italian photographer and documentary filmmaker, based in Paris.After graduating from La Fémis film school in Paris, she created the production company CERESA FILMS entirely dedicated to documentary films. Since then, she produced and directed several short and long feature documentaries that were awarded and shown internationally. While working with moving images she started to develop her passion for photography as an autodidact, embracing a new artistic language, yet deeply connected to documenting reality.

Her work often explores the boundary between the natural and the artificial world, with a special attention on human societies and cultures.

In 2020 her work is published for the first time by the editor GUP magazine, in the collective book « FRESH EYES » featuring the best emerging European photographers.

What being featured means to Adriana:

“Well, I'm just glad someone is interested in my work and there would be no reason for me to say no!”

Back to la Défense

Since October 2020, due to a second wave of Covid19 in Europe, the French government has taken new measures. First by inciting to work from home and putting a curfew in most of the cities, then by finally establishing a full lock. La Défense, the famous business center of Paris, usually crowded, is today almost totally empty offering a new, odd, suggestive scenery. The series explores a place that I last visited years ago, of which I had a childhood memory of great amusement and surprise, a place, that in the 80' was considered as one of the most magnificent human expression of power: economic power and power on nature. Nowadays, especially in this particular and never expected condition, La Défense appears as some kind of mistake, an inhuman, cold, intrinsically empty, disproportionate habitat, yet fascinating for the expression it gives of the human nature.